Monday, June 30, 2008

.Now I become myself. It's takenTime, many years and places;I have been dissolved and shaken,Worn other people's faces,Run madly, as if Time were there,Terribly old, crying a warning,"Hurry, you will be dead before––"(What? Before you reach the morning?Or the end of the poem, is clear?Or love safe in the walled city?)Now to stand still, to be here,Feel my own weight and density!The black shadow on the paperIs my hand; the shadow of a wordAs thought shapes the shaperFalls heavy on the page, is heard.All fuses now, falls into placeFrom wish to action, word to silence,My work, my love, my time, my faceGathered into one intenseGesture of growing like a plant.As slowly as the ripening fruitFertile, detached, and always spent,Falls but does not exhaust the root,So all the poem is, can give,Grows in me to become the song,Made so and rooted so by love.Now there is time and Time is young.O, in this single hour I liveAll of myself and do not moveI, the pursued, who madly ran,Stand still, stand still, and stop the Sun!

Friday, June 27, 2008

Four billion people on this earth,but my imagination is as it was.It copes badly with great numbers,moved only by the singular.Flying through the dark like a beam of light,it reveals the faces that are closest,while the rest sink among the unnoticed,the unthought, the regretted.Dante himself couldn't have managed any better.And I am no Dante,even if all the muses were to help me.

Non omnis moriar,––a premature worry.But do I live fully, and is it enough?It never was, even less so now.I choose by rejecting, for there is no other way,but what I reject is more numerous,more insistent than ever before.At the price of indescribable loss––a short poem, a sigh.To the sonorous calling I respond in whispers.So much I have to leave unsaid.A mouse at the foot of its mother mountain.Life persists in a few scratches on the sand.

Even my dreams are not so peopled.They are full of loneliness, not of noise and crowds.Someone long dead stops in for a moment.A single hand turns a doorknob.Lean–to's of echo overgrow an empty house.I run down from the threshold towards a valleythat is calm as if it were no one's already anachronistic.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

.On getting out of bed the one says, "Ouch!"The other "What?" and when the one says "I said'Ouch,' " the other says, "All right, you needn't shout."

Deucalion and Pyrrha, Darby and Joan, Philemon and Baucis,Tracy and Hepburn––if this can happen to HepburnNo one is safe––all rolled up into two,Contented with the cottage and the cottage cheeseAnd envied only by ambitious gods . . .

Later, over coffee, they compare the backs of their handsAnd conclude they are slowly being turned into lizards.But nothing much surprises them these days.

Friday, June 20, 2008

.The butcher knife goes in, first, at the topAnd carves out the round stemmed lid,The hole of which allows the hand to goIn to pull the gooey mess inside, out––The walls scooped clean with a spoon.A grim design decided on, that afternoon,The eyes are the first to go,Isosceles or trapezoid, the square nose,The down-turned mouth with threeHideous teeth and, sometimes,Round ears. At dusk it'sLighted, the room behind it dark.Outside, looking in, it looks like aPumpkin, it looks like ripenessIs all. Kids come, beckoned byFingers of shadows on leaf-strewn lawnsTo trick or treat. Standing at the openDoor, the sculptor, a warlock, dropsPenny candies into their bags, knowingThe message of winter: only the children,Pretending to be ghosts, are real.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

.The people I love the bestjump into work head firstwithout dallying in the shallowsand swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.They seem to become natives of that element,the black sleek heads of sealsbouncing like half submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submergein the task, who go into the fields to harvestand work in a row and pass the bags along,who stand in the line and haul in their places,who are not parlor generals and field desertersbut move in a common rhythmwhen the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.But the thing worth doing well donehas a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.Greek amphoras for wine or oil,Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museumsbut you know they were made to be used.The pitcher cries for water to carryand a person for work that is real.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

.Since we're setting out to sea, everything in our worldHas suddenly one of two clear, separate names:What We Leave BehindAnd What We Take With Us. We have no need to rehearse disasters,Like being wrecked and stranded, to choose our cargo.We were born marooned,Have been castaways all our lives, Practicing the survivalOf our fittest, and now we know what's necessary:Relics of our bodiesAnd souls, what's left of our minds, remnants of our hearts,And something more weatherproof than our bare skinsTo hold between usAnd the sun, the rain, and the wind which keep no promisesAnd no appointments, but which will surely arriveWith or without our approval––Add food and water, and we can subsist on these aloneAfter a dying fashion. We make our XAt the crux of departureAnd bury there all we no longer treasure: death's-headsOver bones crossing like sabers, a dead man's chest,Songs hollow as laughter,Our pieces of eight and gold doubloons, our empty bottleLeft in the sand behind us, holding the messageOf our light parting breath.

Friday, June 13, 2008

.As the boat draws neara sudden downpour blinds it.Quicksilver shot bounces on the water.The blue-grey lies down.The sea's in the cottages too.A stream of light in the dark hallway.Heavy steps upstairsand chests with newly ironed smiles.An Indian orchestra of copper pans.A baby with eyes all at sea.(The rain starts disappearing.The smoke takes a few faltering stepsin the air above the roofs.)Here comes morebigger than dreams.The beach with the hovels of elms.A notice with the word CABLE.The old heathery moor shinesfor someone who comes flying.Behind the rocks rich furrowsand the scarecrow our outpostbeckoning the colours to itself.An always-bright surprisewhen the island reaches out a handand pulls me up from sadness.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

.In those years, people will say, we lost trackof the meaning of we, of youwe found ourselvesreduced to Iand the whole thing becamesilly, ironic, terrible:we were trying to live a personal lifeand, yes, that was the only lifewe could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plungedinto our personal weatherThey were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drovealong the shore, through rages of fogwhere we stood, saying I

Monday, June 09, 2008

.What we wantis never simple.We move among the thingswe thought we wanted:a face, a room, an open bookand these things bear our names--now they want us.But what we want appearsin dreams, wearing disguises.We fall past,holding out our armsand in the morningour arms ache.We don't remember the dream,but the dream remembers us.It is there all dayas an animal is thereunder the table,as the stars are thereeven in full sun.

Friday, June 06, 2008

.In line at lunch I cross my fork and spoonto ward off complicity—the ordered lifeour leaders have offered us. Thin as a knife,our chance to live depends on such a signwhile others talk and The Pentagon from the moonis bouncing exact commands: "Forget your faith;be ready for whatever it takes to win: we faceannihilation unless all citizens get in line."

I bow and cross my fork and spoon: somewhereother citizens more fearfully bowin a place terrorized by their kind of oppressive state.Our signs both mean, "You hostages over therewill never be slaughtered by my act." Our vowscross: never to kill and call it fate.

Thursday, June 05, 2008

.If we will have the wisdom to survive,to stand like slow-growing treeson a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,if we will make our seasons welcome here,asking not too much of earth or heaven,then a long time after we are deadthe lives our lives prepare will livethere, their houses strongly placedupon the valley sides, fields and gardensrich in the windows. The river will runclear, as we will never know it,and over it, birdsong like a canopy.On the levels of the hills will begreen meadows, stock bells in noon shade.On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut downthe old forest, an old forest will stand,its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.Families will be singing in the fields.In their voices they will hear a musicrisen out of the ground. They will takenothing from the ground they will not return,whatever the grief at parting. Memory,native to this valley, will spread over itlike a grove, and memory will growinto legend, legend into song, songinto sacrament. The abundance of this place,the songs of its people and its birds,will be health and wisdom and indwellinglight. This is no paradisal dream.Its hardship is its possibility

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

.Lying under the stars in the summer nightLate while the autumn constellations climb the skyas the cluster of Hercules falls down the westI put the telescope by......my body is asleep only my eyes and brain are awakethe stars stand around me like gold eyesI can no longer tell where I begin and leave offthe faint breeze in the dark pines and theinvisible grassthe tipping earththe swarming stars have an eye that sees itself.